Not Without You (43 page)

It’s great being married again, except I’m not working at the present time and she’s all day and night at the studio. I hear you asking why I’m not working – it’s the old demon again, Rose, drink. I fell off that wagon, hard. A few things were getting me down, and I wasn’t as strong as I needed to be. I don’t seem to be able to be, these days. Not to get our long-distance friendship off on the wrong step, but I knew I could do it, give it up, for you. It was hard, but not as hard as all the other times, because you were the reward. Hope that’s not embarrassing to hear. Here, there’s so much temptation. The bar on the corner, the drinks trolley in the writer’s room, the guys disappearing into an old speakeasy on their way home. And I feel old, Rose, past it, ridiculous. I see them looking at me, thinking, What’s that old fella doing, here with Hannah? Oh, that’s the drunk. All the usual stuff, except now at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near, as the song goes.

Don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Yes, I do. I always could tell you anything. Hope you feel the same way too.

Thanks, my long-distance friend.

Don

24th June 1974

Dearest Don,

I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been having a hard time of it. I’m sorry I didn’t write back, that I behaved like such an idiot.

You understand good days and bad days, and I’m even sorrier to hear you’re having too many of the latter yourself. Don, nothing’s worth falling off the wagon for. You know it. Oh, how bossy and glib that sounds. As you know I loathe nothing more than well-meaning people telling me what’s best for me. The doctor who said I should move into a community – as if I were eighty and infirm, instead of not quite forty. The man at the village shop who bit his lip for four years and only last week asked me if I had someone to telephone. To telephone for what? I wanted to shout. I need no one out here.

So I’m going to tell you a story. To take your mind off your own troubles.

I want to tell you the real story of a girl named Rose. I write everything down when I remember it. I even use carbon paper sometimes, to keep a copy of the letters I write to you, so I know what I’ve said. My memory isn’t good any more as you know. And I want to write this one down. I know you liked stories from my English childhood. Well, there was a little girl, and her sister, and they liked to play together in the woods by their house. Now, the little girl was naughty, and she sometimes made her parents extremely cross. She would roar and scream, and go rigid, and drum her feet on the ground. She’d stop listening and go stiff, pointing one finger out to hell, as if someone else had taken control of her body. Someone evil.

This little girl didn’t mean to lose control, but it kept happening. Once, she kicked a maid so hard she fell down the stairs, and she broke her leg. Another time she knocked her mother out. She didn’t know how to stop being like this. She thought she was mad, that someone made her do these things because the devil had got inside her. Her little sister was good, why couldn’t she be good too? She was too young to understand it and her behaviour grew worse. Her parents stopped wondering if she was merely naughty and started to think she was possessed by something, something evil. Her mother was a fervent Christian, and she believed the devil was testing her, that he had possessed her daughter. The servants left one by one, they didn’t want to look after a devil-child. The doctor from the hospital in Gloucester told them it was most likely something evil had got into her head and he advised them to put her away. That is what they believed.

So one day, when the little girl was eight, she and her younger sister were playing in the river by their house. It was spring. They had been told not to play there, for though the river was thin and low, it wasn’t quite a stream, it had a strong current. Suddenly Rose stared at her sister, and her eyes rolled back in her head, and she started to shake, and jerk, and she slipped in the water, screaming and flailing, and hit her head. She was apparently dead, and her little sister didn’t know what to do – should she stay with her, or run for help?

She ran for help, but afterwards her parents told her it had been the wrong thing to do. They told her Rose was dead.

But it wasn’t true. She was spirited away the same night. Unconscious, this time drugged, but as she left the house by the river she screamed, and the screams woke her sister up, and though she remembered the sounds afterwards, she never understood what they were.

Rose was taken to the home that night. She lay still for two days, and when she woke up, she was bound to her bed. A nurse told her she had nearly killed her little sister with her pranks. That she was evil, best left alone, nasty and foul, and she wouldn’t ever see her family again. Oh, Don. She was eight years old. She stayed in that home until she was twenty-eight, and I came to take her away again. For twenty years all she knew was the home. They starved her, beat her, kept her locked up to her bed in a room by herself for a week after she had a fit.

She stopped having the episodes when she was around nineteen – apparently this is common in childhood epilepsy. After that she was allowed to paint, to walk in the garden, to go on drives; it stopped being quite so much of a prison. But no one came for her, no one at all. Apart from her parents and the people at the home, everyone else thought she was dead, and she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t understand why no one ever came for her. How could she have known?

I found out later that all that time she was only five miles away from her family’s house. Five miles.

She would have stayed there for ever, maybe. But her parents died, one soon after the other. They had provided for her care in their will, she was to stay at the home indefinitely: that’s what you did, even then. You locked them away, out of sight.

They wrote to tell the next of kin that the arrangement would continue. The next of kin, a younger sister, living far away now, never replied, and another year went past. But some kind soul at the home wrote to them again. She said that Rose was here, and that she needed her. And when that letter arrived it might have been kicked under a mat or hidden from her sister like the first letter, but it just so happened that she saw it. But her sister was ill too, maybe because all along her mind was trying to tell her something. She kept the letter secret and when she was better, she came to England. She found the home and one sunny afternoon she walked up to her sister, tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Rose, I’m here. I’ve come to take you away.’

My sister Rose is alive and well, and we live together here. Our parents’ house is nearby. It is derelict; neither she nor I had done anything about it since their death. We don’t ever want to go back there. One day nature will take it over, and eventually perhaps nothing of it will remain.

You’re the only one who knows all this. We are both happy now. She can’t hurt me, and I can’t hurt her.

I hope that’s given you something to think about!

Eve

Hannah sounds beautiful. I am very happy for you.

July 1st, 1974

Dear Eve,

My love to you both. Many things make sense now. You said to me once in Big Sur you felt she was still with you. You were right. It makes me sad to think how unhappy you’ve both been. Oh honey. What can I say? I’m so sorry. My God, it must be hard.

Love to you both. I hope to meet your sister one day.

Don

November 24th, 1977

Eve,

Thanks for your last letter; I did enjoy your description of the cats and life at home. I’m writing this on Thanksgiving. We’re back from the Macy’s parade and treating ourselves to some eggnog (not me; I’m having milk, with a little nutmeg. It looks like it could be eggnog and that’ll have to do). We have folks from our building over. Thanksgiving makes me think of home, my home. I grew up in the Depression, and there wasn’t a lot to go round, except on Thanksgiving. My father always had the day off school and he’d make us play football out on the front lawn, me and my sister, even if it was raining. The Matthews Annual Touchdown, he’d call it. Bridget hated it, but I loved it. We’d eat, and Mom always told us the story of the first Thanksgiving, how we came to live here, her ancestors all the way from Holland, would you believe? And Dad’s, all the way from Galway, back when he was called Flaherty, not Matthews. How each set of grandparents met, one pair in the milk bar on Avenue A, the others at Ellis Island, just off the boat. We’d listen to the radio, we had a big set in the den, and when the music came on he and Mom would dance. I can see them now in that old house, swaying in time, holding onto each other, while we watched. They seemed so perfectly in step and it was as though we weren’t there, just the two of them dancing around the room, past my mother’s china figurines on the little shelf by the window, past my father’s easy chair, the slippers, the pipe, everything as it should be. It felt like a home, that place, always did, and I think of it on this day every year. I don’t know why but I’ve never come anywhere close to recreating it. I’ll be fifty in a couple of years, Rose. Seems a waste of a life, that’s all, and I know I still have a lot to be thankful for.

I’m thankful for you in my life and for the fact I can tell you anything. Hope that’s OK.

Don

7th December 1977

Dear Don,

Of course you can tell me anything. That’s what these letters are for, aren’t they? I feel like I am sane, my old self, me, when I write to you. The rest of the world is like alien life on my own planet, but this makes sense.

This is my Christmas letter to you, and I hope it reaches you before the 25th. I don’t like Christmas much. It’s the one time of the year I want to be gaudy and gay, and then I think about how one might do that and I shrink from it. Ask Miss Torode the choir mistress from the church in for a sweet sherry? The novelty might finish both of us off. We’ve been here now for over fifteen years, and I guess I’m feeling a little antsy, for perhaps the first time. Rose is out, getting supplies. It’s very cold here.

Someone wrote to me last week about re-releasing
A
Girl Named Rose
on its eighteenth anniversary. Can you believe it, Don? Eighteen years ago next year. They want me to go up to London, introduce a screening at the National Film Theatre. I said no, of course, and then I wished I hadn’t. But we wouldn’t get any peace again, and I have peace now – sometimes too much, when I can hear the carol singers in the village below and I know they won’t visit us, because they’re scared. And when I lie in bed on Christmas morning, and think about the old times, in the house not ten miles from here, where we had Father’s rugby socks as stockings, green and blue striped. I remember one year there was an orange, some chocolate, a new ribbon for my hair, a little enamel brooch of a rose, a dancing wooden man with string in his legs and arms. I was so happy. We bounced on our parents’ bed, shouting, laughing, shouting again. I gave the brooch to Rose, of course. I wanted her to be good, and she was that day. It was a good day. Many things that came afterwards were terrible. We have been through a lot to find this peace, and I’m scared of giving it up. Do you understand?

Well, enough of this. Happy Christmas, dear Don, to you and Hannah. I shall think of you, with love, as I always do. Please don’t drink.

Eve

24th September 1984

Dear Don,

Did you see Joe Baxter died? It was on the radio this morning. I burnt the porridge, and then I threw it in the bin and burst into tears. Rose thought I’d gone quite mad: well, she’s probably right. He must have been eighty, if he was a day. Vile, vile, vile man! They interviewed someone from the studio, I can’t remember who it was, an old movie star. She fawned over his memory as if he’d been Mother Teresa, not a lecherous, repressive, dishonest old bastard. The obituary in
The Times
was no less fawning. I came as close as I ever have to writing to a paper about it; but can you imagine the letter?

Dear Sirs: further to your obituary of Joseph Baxter, I would like to add a few comments of my own. Yes, he was at the studio while
Redbeard the Pirate
,
Dawn Patrol
and
A Girl Named Rose
were made, amongst others, but the writers on those films were due the credit, not he. To my knowledge none of them has ever received the royalties due them nor the recognition. Yes, he spotted talent, but to say he nurtured it so that it could flourish is entirely false, unless you call rape of a minor nurturing, or blackmail, or homophobia, or false imprisonment, or perverting the cause of justice.

He had excellent taste in ties, however. I believe that was him and not his wife or his mistress.

Yours, Eve Sallis

Once known as Eve Noel

Whaddya think? I might send it off later today.

My sister sends her regards. She is knitting a pair of gloves for me. Cherry red, they’re delightful. Perkins came home safely, thank you. He had a dead mouse and was covered in cobwebs, so I suspect he’d trapped himself in a cellar somewhere. So the house is full to bursting again.

Love Eve

August 2nd, 1989

Dearest Eve,

It’s late, almost two in the morning. I’m preparing next semester’s classes and one of the topics the professor professes we teach is Heroes and Villains, and one of the movies on the list is
Dare to Win
. I’m alone, Hannah’s up at Martha’s Vineyard with some friends. Manhattan is a soup, tourists, heat, sweat. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia, perhaps the night, or the loneliness, but it got me thinking about Gilbert, and you, and I hope you don’t mind me writing you about it, in the dog days of August. He’s almost forgotten now, and it seems so strange that he had any success. He was always seen as the perfect English gent, when he was one of the most unpleasant human beings I’ve ever known. Even before he hurt you. You know the reason he did so well in wartime was he was suited to it – he loved killing, hurting, maiming. I guess we should be glad he was on our side not theirs. I was thinking all this over, perhaps for a class on how you write a hero in a screenplay, and then I realised, it’s all crap anyway, isn’t it? You get stuck with an image and that’s it. The studios make you, and the fans insist you stay that way. But who remembers Gilbert Travers today? No one, except film students and old men.